291–300 of 317 posts
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Yikes. So scary that this is the top comment. Climate change can definitely be addressed at the corporate level with carbon taxes and even caps. No need to throw away our free and open society. The fact that your go-to is to attack human rights is terrifying.
It is not a human right to make the planet uninhabitable for future generations
We need “unprecedented measures” to stop and reverse the “unprecedented” damage we have caused to the planet and its climate. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and if the past year of climate catastrophes has shown us anything, it’s high time we act. Yes, the proposed changes might be inconvenient but it’s time we suck it up and do the needful. Small steps are not good enough. We need drastic measures.
It’s politically impossible. Even if we do it, the resulting reduction in fossil consumption here will lower their price and cause them to be burned in developing nations. CO2 is CO2 and physics doesn’t care about politics. Poor countries cannot afford the luxury of caring about the distant future and poverty is worse than most natural disasters. There is too much to be gained by exploiting cheap energy to undercut o…
What if all of the developed nations agreed to impose punitively high tariffs on all imports from developing nations that did this?
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>Desperate times call for desperate measures, and if the past year of climate catastrophes has shown us anything, it’s high time we act. This same rhetoric has been repeated for decades, and has continually received the same, hostile response from the public and politicians. I'm not arguing that it's wrong or untruthful, but alarmist statements like this are a demonstrably poor tool for rousing the public into action…
But is it really “alarmism” to yell at people inside a house on fire that they need to “get the hell out now!” even if some people in a separate part of the building (not touched by the fire yet) insist that the growing heat is due to something else, God has it in control and would never set the fire, in fact the people yelling out the warnings are just being “alarmist”, it’s against their constitutional rights etc?…
OK, I did use the wrong word there (looking it up, "alarmism" carries different connotations to what I thought), but frankly that's beside the point.
If you want to enact real change (getting people out of the building), and yelling at them about how they're going to die for 4 hours straight has been ineffective, perhaps it's time to try a different strategy.
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I agree. Alarmist rhetoric since at least the mid-1980s. We've made massive progress on environmental issues since then, but still the same alarmist rhetoric.
> We've made massive progress on environmental issues Care to elaborate? Afaic, global CO2 emissions keep going up year after year.
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We need everyone to stop using ICE vehicles, which is distinct to needing everyone to switch to EVs. That distinction is the reason why EV subsidies are so much worse than a carbon or ICE tax. A subsidy leads to pathologies like bike owners giving money to EV owners when that arrow should be flipped. I don't need an EV (or any car), but now I'm artificially incentivized to get one and will actually increase pollution…
While bikes, walking, and public transportation are great in cities, for much of the United States those are not viable options.
If software was developed the way politicians pass laws, Linux would get one master commit every few years with thousands of unrelated things in it, from typo fixes to sketchy telemetry, with a 1500 pages long description, and the commit would be branded as "build security better". The review would be a months long show where maintainers of all factions with their own agendas would try to negotiate behind the closed…
Real world is more complex than some glorified text editor (or whatever Linux is)
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It’s politically impossible. Even if we do it, the resulting reduction in fossil consumption here will lower their price and cause them to be burned in developing nations. CO2 is CO2 and physics doesn’t care about politics. Poor countries cannot afford the luxury of caring about the distant future and poverty is worse than most natural disasters. There is too much to be gained by exploiting cheap energy to undercut o…
> Even if we do it, the resulting reduction in fossil consumption here will lower their price and cause them to be burned in developing nations. What if all of the developed nations agreed to impose punitively high tariffs on all imports from developing nations that did this?
The only way it could work is if the USA, China, the EU, Russia, Japan, and all the other major powers and modern economies all formed a tight unified front. I see basically zero chance of that happening.
The US, EU, and their orbit seem like the only ones that care even a little, and they are doing half measures at the very best. China pretends to care and burns more coal. Russia’s entire economy is dependent on fossil fuels, as is much of the Middle East.
Then keep in mind that any measure that squeezes the middle class is going to provoke a huge populist backlash. Do anything that impoverishes working people and climate change denialists will be voted in.
Make low carbon energy cheaper than fossil fuels or prepare for 800+ppm CO2. That’s how I see it.
If software was developed the way politicians pass laws, Linux would get one master commit every few years with thousands of unrelated things in it, from typo fixes to sketchy telemetry, with a 1500 pages long description, and the commit would be branded as "build security better". The review would be a months long show where maintainers of all factions with their own agendas would try to negotiate behind the closed…
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This is the funny part, isn't it? The article talks about opposition to a bill but doesn't clearly name the bill or even explain its actual contents. The closest it gets is a link to another article that talks about two bills - a social policy bill and an infrastructure bill. One would think that an article in 2021 of a bill or a proposed bill could have a direct reference (preferably a link) to the document in quest…
And the reason why they are bulked into a single bill is to utilise the budget reconciliation procedure which bypasses the filibuster. I think the filibuster has some merit. If you want to do something controversial (to the point that the opponents are willing to do the physical effort of making speeches 24h a day to stop it), there must be a strong majority of 60%, not just 50%. But there must be some sort of cost t…
It does not make any sense in any universe to take a legislative body that is already counter-majoritarian and then add on even more counter-majoritarian rules and procedures on top.
The thing about 'real' filibusters vs. the pretend one in the US Senate isn't just that they cost something, it's that they are generally doomed to fail if that's all you have.
Even endless talking has historically been rarely enough on its own to prevent a bill from passing in most legislatures. It can be an opportunity to bring attention to the issue and make legislators have to listen to their voters, or to convince other legislators to reconsider. But something else has to happen or eventually the bill will have to be tabled anyways.
But I think people fail to recognize this, because the concept of filibuster in the US has been so thoroughly distorted by this broken rule. Even if the filibuster required actually doing an endless talk, it would still not be sufficiently democratic if they could simply run out a clock and the bill was defeated -- in fact, that would perhaps be even worse since it would allow any given member to exercise an unreasonable amount of control over the body as a whole that currently at least requires some degree of unity among the minority party.
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https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/571724-democrats-make-ca... It doesn't "grant citizenship", just provides a pathway for "Dreamers, temporary protected status holders, agricultural and other essential workers" to "getting permanent legal status or a green card". Which may then lead to citizenship if they meet the requirements.
Ah. So it does have more than climate change issues in it. As a Canuck, I see this as a huge US weakness. These megabills, riders and such. The parent's point is valid. If people cared, really, really cared, it would be a single purpose bill. It would be more effective too, in that, people could legitimately say... this is only about climate change. Nothing else. What part of this do you object to? Right now, it clea…